Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

On Sunday, 3 June 2012, amidst the pomp, pageantry and celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. King’s Church Medway were having a minor celebration of their own - a launch party of not just one, but three brand new websites which concluded four months of hard work and effort by  everyone involved in the project. If you have followed the journey through my series of case-study blog posts, you will know that I asked to be involved after seeing a new website launched at the beginning of the year by the existing media team and publicly advertised by my Uncle Matthew, who is pastor of the church. I felt that the website was of insufficient quality, that it suffered from a lack of direction and a confused message. It was also blatantly clear that it had been built by someone with little experience and who had gotten by with a huge amount of commitment and enthusiasm. You’ll also know that I started this project by understanding more about the work done by the church, by its ...

It has been nearly two months since I wrote the last part of my series of case studies looking at the project I am currently working on for King’s Church Medway. I’m pleased to say that those two months have not been wasted. We have the skeletal bones of the websites and creative ideas in place, we have a launch date in mind and all hands are on deck adding gloss to make sure that the final products are something that I and more importantly the church can be proud of. With that in mind, I thought that now would be the ideal opportunity to talk about copy. A website generally has many levels of engagement. You have the ‘bouncer’s’; those visitors who have hit your website by mistake and immediately leave. You have those who arrive at the correct destination, but leave shortly afterwards as the site on first view just doesn’t do it for them. There are people who then arrive to be nosey, looking around the website, looking at the pictures and videos with no real aim in getting someth...

Towards the end of last month, I read a status update from my Uncle Matthew who is Pastor of King's Church in Medway. His status championed the launch of his church’s new website and encouraged his Facebook connections to visit. Except that when I did, I wasn’t enthused by what I saw. After I put across my point of view he agreed with my assessment and accepted my invitation to review the current site and work with him and his team to start again - pretty much from the ground up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited the church several times. On each occasion we’ve had a proactive discussion on what a potential new website should feature, how it should look and most importantly of all, how it should communicate - not just to visitors of the website, but to friends of people who belong to the church, or organisations that help on a daily basis to do good for the greater church community. We made a decision early on that we were actually dealing with multiple websites rather t...

As in life, users of the Internet can be loosely grouped into demographics, or categories dependent upon age, or behaviour. We use them at work in planning for a website, add a little bit of fictional background information, give them a name and call them ‘persona's’ which are designed to try and work out ways in which the project we are building can be used to serve them purposely. The other night, a chance conversation led me into taking my own persona and dissecting it into pieces, not for research but to stand up for who I am and what I work and believe in. A friend of mine greeted me on Friday night by saying “how are you doing, how is your second life?” which I wasn’t quite sure how to take. Originally, I took it as it was intended, as a bit of banter, taking the piss - we do it all the time, nobody is, or should be immune. But being a sensitive creature and one prone to over analysis, I pondered the question over the space of a few days and thought, actually, this might ...

This little corner of the Internet was originally intended as a place to keep Dad up to date with the comings and goings on at home whilst he worked out in Iran. With the Internet now becoming ever more 'social' content found here was gradually being duplicated elsewhere, leading me to question whether or not I needed a website at all. Facebook, the Daddy of all things social on the web wasn't around back in the early naughties when adambird.co.uk went live, and has since grown into a daily institution in people's digital lives. More or less everyone I know is a friend on Facebook and I can share with them photographs of Oliver and the family without worrying about whether or not a complete stranger has accidentally roamed onto my website. I can update news in tiny nuggets of information through the form of a status update, or a tweet and not have to worry about updating the html and RSS on my homepage - v4.0 therefore, is all about the management of content. Using ...

My Facebook status read this morning "iPad or iPooed? Feel it's more of a nice to have, rather than a must have..." and have since felt a certain need to elaborate. Firstly, just what the hell am I talking about? Well, if you don't know already, Apple have launched a new product, named the iPad, which prior to yesterday's announcement was the stuff of online legend, myth and unfathomable hype. Paddy Power even ran a book so you could bet upon the new devices name. The iPad, in short is a new, larger iPod touch, incorporating all of the features you would expect with the iPod touch, including being able to run most, if not all of the applications from the iTunes store, play music, store photos, browse the web and use the very useful mapping application. It's video playback mode has been enhanced meaning that you can play HD video content upon the device as well as a new(ish) application which allows you to download and read e-books, as you would a normal b...